All in all, Razer has followed the Apple MacBook laptop playbook, starting strong, leaving the high points alone, and keeping its design recognizable over many years. We’ve liked the Razer Blade’s aluminum unibody construction from the beginning, as well as its overall look and feel, so it physically staying more or less the same doesn’t bother us.

Two major changes in the 2016 Blade, however, irrevocably set it apart from previous editions. One is visible, and one is not. This year’s model is equipped with a fancy RGB LED-backlit keyboard, in which each key can be individually set to one of 16.8 million colors. Razer calls it the Chroma keyboard (the company offers desktop RGB equivalents, as well), which we first experienced on the Razer Blade Stealth ultrabook in March. The Chroma keyboard is one of our favorite parts of the 2016 Blade, mainly for its stunning look (more on that later).

The second big change has to do with Razer’s approach to gaming graphics, and the new Blade's upgradability via Razer’s optional external graphics box, called Razer Core. (See our Core and Blade preview from CES 2016.) Core is a bit up in the air, at the moment, pending our review of it, and we’ll discuss that further on in this review. But depending on the buyer and his or her way of using their laptop, it’s at least as big a deal, potentially, as the new Chroma keyboard.

The Blade's guts have been changed a bit, as well. On the inside, the 2016 Blade improves upon the outgoing 2015 model by upping the processor to Intel’s bread-and-butter heavy lifter for gaming laptops, the “Skylake” Core i7-6700HQ quad-core. This chip runs at 2.6GHz, with a possible Turbo Boost frequency up to 3.5GHz. On the graphics side, the 2016 Blade retains the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, but it gets double the video memory, now 6GB. (Nvidia’s new powerhouse GeForce graphics chips, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, haven’t yet shown up in mobile versions.)

The 2016 model also keeps its 16GB of RAM, but now it’s the newer DDR4 standard (running at 2,133MHz) to complement the Skylake Core i7 processor, instead of last year’s DDR3L-1600. And last, the 2016 Blade’s solid-state drive (SSD) has been rerouted to the PCI Express bus, and supports the wicked-fast NVMe protocol.

The biggest news of all around the 2016 Blade is that it’s a lot less expensive. The 2015 version we reviewed with a 256GB SSD was $2,399 at the same rough tier of components as our 2016 model. For the 2016 refresh, the 256GB model is now $1,999, and upping the SSD to 512GB hoists it to $2,299.

We’re happy Razer dropped the price as far as it did, even if we’ll stop short of calling it a bargain. The competing 14-inch MSI GS40 Phantom, for one, offers almost identical specs, including a Core i7-6700HQ and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970M, for $1,599, while the Gigabyte P34W v5 does the same for $1,699. However, neither of those laptops, while both trim and mean, is quite as sleek as the 2016 Blade, nor does either have an RGB LED keyboard, a touch display, or the same potential for upgradable graphics.

As you can see, there’s more to this value equation than straight-up performance. If ever an evolving shopping situation merited an “It’s Complicated,” it’s this one. So let’s dig in.

Design

The Razer Blade's all-black exterior is an aluminum unibody, along the lines of the mostly seamless shells of Apple’s MacBook machines. Its overall appearance has changed little since its inception in 2013. We weren't asking for radical changes to the design then, and we aren't now. It’s a clean look, with simple lines and rounded edges.

The lid's hinge is all one piece, and it stretches along the rear edge of the notebook, like so…

It does an excellent job of preventing display wobble when you tap it, while still allowing the display to be opened with just one hand. A cutout just in front of the touch pad allows your fingertips to get easy purchase there when flipping it open…

The exterior design accents are minimal. Razer’s snaky green logo is prominently centered in the back of the display lid…

For nighttime computing or formal situations, you can turn off the logo using the included Razer Synapse software, giving the laptop a soberer, more businesslike mien. Two slight ridges run down the display lid, but otherwise, the Blade’s exterior surfaces are smooth. Only the display surface is glossy.

The Razer’s chassis has about the same footprint as a standard 14-inch notebook, at 13.6x9.3 inches. That said, it's considerably thinner than most 14-inch notebooks, at just 0.7 inch. MSI's GS40 Phantom and the Aorus X3 Plus v3, for example, are 0.9 inch thick. As of early June 2016, we couldn’t locate a thinner 14-inch gaming notebook on the market with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics chip, though we saw a preview of Gigabyte’s Aero 14 at Computex 2016, which came close, at 0.78 inch.

The strength and rigidity of the Blade’s chassis is impressive. It withstood our attempts to induce flex or rattles. The quality of the aluminum construction is first-rate. The only mild downside to the grade of aluminum used is weight. The 2016 Blade is 4.25 pounds, a half-pound more than the MSI GS40 Phantom.

The biggest visual change between the 2015 and 2016 Blades, as we mentioned in our introduction, is the addition of the Chroma keyboard. Rather than confining you to classic Razer green, each key now can show an individual RGB backlight, with 16.8 million color possibilities per key. The pre-installed Razer Synapse software allows you to go well beyond simply setting colors, however. Along the lines of Corsair’s desktop gaming keyboards (like the Vengeance K65 RGB) and their CUE software, as we discovered, it's possible to spend countless hours creating your own lighting patterns and layered effects. You can set the colors to cycle endlessly through random colors, run a particular pattern ripple across the keyboard, or even push a particularly mesmerizing wave pattern, which flows all the colors of the rainbow—and we mean that literally—across the keyboard. Razer has recently added a preset "starlight" pattern, too, which slowly winks random keys on and off, as well as a fire pattern, which makes the keyboard emulate flickering flames. It’s an impressive sight.

Beyond bling, the Chroma lighting has a functional side. For starters, the board comes with a bunch of pre-configured profiles for games. In the "FPS" preset, for example, the WASD cluster, numbers 1 through 5, and a few of the surrounding keys (such as the left Ctrl) are illuminated in different colors. Some games have built-in support for Chroma, which further integrates the lighting by having the keyboard flash or pulse in a certain pattern depending on what's happening in the game, among other triggers. As we said, it's possible to spend countless hours configuring the Chroma keyboard's lighting patterns to suit both your aesthetic desires and your in-game needs.

We do like the execution of lighting itself, as well. On some gaming laptops, the key backlighting looks sloppy or uneven, or spills out around the keytop edges. Here, the keyboard backlighting is laser-sharp and exceptionally bright in dark environments. It's perfectly visible outdoors in the shade, as well. You can adjust the brightness via the Synapse software. Our only complaint about the backlighting is that the secondary symbols on the keys, such as the exclamation point on the number 1 key, are in a gray text that's almost invisible in darker environments.

What the Chroma keyboard has in show, though, it lacks in tactile feel. The Chiclet-style keys have limited vertical travel, and consequently minimal feedback. The feel is too much like pressing plastic squares. The abrupt stop at the bottom of the keystroke is rather harsh, as well. Further positive aspects include the anti-glare key surfaces, and the lack of flex in the keyboard deck. But we’d hoped for a bit more vertical travel and more of a “click” or other response to each keypress.

The keyboard layout could be improved a bit, too. The Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn commands are executed as Fn-key combinations with the directional-arrow keys, even though the arrow keys aren't labeled as such. Preferably, these would be dedicated keys.

Also, considering the Blade is a gaming notebook, we'd like to see a dedicated set of macro keys, as on the competing Aorus X3 Plus v3 and Gigabyte P34W v5. It’s possible to set custom shortcuts to the stock keyboard keys in the Synapse software, but they don’t replace the convenience of an isolated macro-key row…

The Razer’s Synaptics touch pad is set in the dead center of the palm rest. It's of the traditional kind, with dedicated left- and right-click buttons…

The touch pad's surface has a well-done anti-glare finish and is slightly oversized given the 14-inch display. The two narrow mouse-click buttons have a reasonable amount of feedback. They're not completely silent, but they don't make a loud click when pressed. The pad is perfectly fine for day-to-day use, though of course gamers will attach a mouse for most serious gaming sessions.

Features

The 2016 Blade retains the outgoing model’s 14-inch display. It has a 3,200x1,800-pixel native resolution, also commonly referred to as "3K." Now, this is too high of a resolution for the Blade’s GeForce GTX 970M to push at high detail settings with big AAA gaming titles from the last few years. Nonetheless, you can play at 1,920x1,080 without too much quality loss and with the detail settings cranked way up.

Even if you can’t expose the full display-resolution monty in new games, you’ll appreciate the 3K screen in older games and when you’re not gaming on the Blade. Plus, this screen really brings the screen-quality goods, to a level above and beyond that of a typical IPS panel. (And, mind you, even IPS isn’t standard among other gaming laptops.) The display is an IGZO panel, similar to IPS in that it offers nearly unlimited viewing angles from any direction. The picture generally looks the same whether you tilt the display forward or back, or view it side to side. The picture quality is overall satisfactory, with plenty of rich color for gaming and multimedia tasks. The brightness and contrast are both above average. It's possible that the glossy screen enhances the perception of the color; Razer stated to us that the screen supports coverage of 70 percent of the sRGB gamut, and to our eyes, it performs as if it's higher than that.

It’s also notable that the display is a touch panel. None of the 2016 Blade’s immediate competitors, including the Aorus X3 Plus v3, offers touch. It’s a feature seldom found on gaming notebooks of any screen size. Whether you use touch or not is personal preference. Ourselves, we think it’s useful on smaller notebooks, especially if you’re using your machine in your lap. The major downside of touch support is the obligatory glossy display surface. It can be somewhat distracting in well-lit environments, since it acts as a reflective surface. Also, fingerprints tend to be quite visible.

The Blade's port selection is constrained mostly by its 0.7-inch-thick chassis. You get no legacy ports here, such as VGA or Ethernet. [When did Ethernet become a "legacy port"? <sigh> —Ed.] This 2016 version of the Blade adds USB Type-C (see our primer on USB Type-C and USB 3.1/Thunderbolt 3), however, for which you can find pricey adapters of all sorts. It's also useful for connecting high-bandwidth devices, such as multiple 4K displays and Razer's $499 Core external-graphics-card housing. As of this writing, Razer was offering a $100 discount on the Razer Core when purchased along with the Blade at Razer's online store. (We’ll discuss the Core more shortly.)

The Blade’s left edge holds the headphone/microphone combination jack, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, and the AC power jack…

The right side holds the remaining ports, including the USB Type-C, a third USB 3.0 port, a full-size HDMI 1.4b output, and a Kensington-type retaining-cable lock slot…

It would've been nice to see HDMI 2.0, but the USB Type-C almost makes up for it. Note that the 2016 Blade’s USB Type-C port also supports Thunderbolt 3, which not all such ports do.

The most glaring omission, from a connectivity standpoint, is the lack of an SD/flash-memory card reader. At least from the outside, there appears to be ample real estate on the sides and front edge of the Blade’s chassis to include one. But we suspect the slot being AWOL is an issue of not enough room inside the machine for the insertion mechanism.

The 720p camera centered above the display returned a somewhat pixelated quality to moving images, and muted colors. It's sharp enough to pass for HD quality, though. We had no complaints using it for casual Web chats.

The Blade's twin speakers reside on either side of the keyboard. Their positioning works well, since they won't be blocked by your wrists or otherwise while typing. The sound quality is, unfortunately, lacking in most other respects. For starters, the volume doesn't get loud enough for entertaining more than one person. The speakers also sound strained at upper volume levels, and bass is mostly absent. We thought the smaller Razer Blade Stealth had better speakers, though we do understand that most gamers will be employing a headset instead.

Components & the Razer Core

The 2016 Blade adopts Intel's 6th-generation/"Skylake" processors, here specifically the top-end Core i7-6700HQ quad-core. This was the only processor choice possible when buying the Blade as of June 2016. It has a base clock of 2.6GHz, with a Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz depending on the situation. It's well-suited to playing today's games and running demanding tasks, and it's no slouch for processor-intensive media-crunching work, either. If you're a graphics or video guru by day and a gamer by night, the Blade's CPU will satisfy as well as any in a laptop of this size and class.

This year's Blade retains the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics chip from 2015's model, but Razer doubled its onboard graphics memory to 6GB. This is important for newer games like Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider, which recommends a dedicated graphics processor and a 4GB dollop of graphics RAM to handle the highest texture settings. We'll see shortly in our benchmarks that this known-quantity video card still has respectable performance for today’s titles. It's generally capable of running AAA games at a 1,920x1,080 (FHD) resolution with medium-to-high detail settings, and many older ones maxed out at 1080p. As of this writing, the GeForce GTX 970M is the fastest graphics card available in a 14-inch gaming notebook.

For gamers, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 2016 Blade is its USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support. We didn’t get a chance to test the external-graphics aspect yet, but this port allows you to connect Razer’s Core external-graphics-card module, which is essentially a box with a Thunderbolt 3 interface and a built-in power supply that can host a desktop-style video card of your choice. (See our CES 2016 preview of Core here.) You can install any recent full-size PCI Express x16 desktop graphics card, such as the GeForce GTX 1080 or the more economical GeForce GTX 1070. The card can be up to double-width, and Razer has qualified certain families of GPU on its online store. It looks like all the recent ones are there, and ones that aren't wouldn't be an improvement on the internal GeForce GTX 970M (with the exception of unfittable water-cooled ones like the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X.)

Razer Core external graphics unit

You can use the Core either to power gaming on an external display, or have the Thunderbolt 3 interface carry the graphics data back to the Blade to enhance the performance of games on the laptop's own 3K display. This could indeed come in handy, given the very high resolution of the 2016 Blade's screen, but we'll have to try out the Core in person to see how well that kind of "loopback" situation works. Note that the Core can also serve as a sort of connection hub or dock for all your gaming gear. If you're trying to create a full-desktop gaming setup with the Blade laptop at the center but a bigger external display, you can connect your gaming keyboard, mouse, USB headset, and the monitor all to the Core, instead of to the laptop itself. That will reduce the connection chores and cable mess by a lot.

But the Core's not cheap. The Razer Core retails for $499.99 without a graphics card, though Razer was offering it for $100 off when purchased with a 2016 Blade via its online store, as of the publish date of this review. Nonetheless, the Core can give the Blade a significantly extended gaming lifespan, and it should open a window onto making the Blade a hybrid gaming desktop/laptop. More on Core when we get one in hand.

As for memory, the 2016 Blade has been upgraded to the DDR4-2133 standard from the 2015 Blade’s DDR3L-1600. The amount of memory, 16GB, hasn’t changed since last year. It’s not upgradable, but at present (and for the foreseeable future) 16GB is plenty for modern gaming.

As we also noted earlier, the Samsung 256GB boot SSD in our review unit supported the PCI Express interface and the NVMe protocol for lightning-fast read and write performance. The performance boost is noticeable, as we’ll see in the benchmarks, though this doesn't change the fact that the Blade lags behind competitors on storage capacity. It has just a single M.2 Type 2280 (80mm) slot. The competing Aorus X3 Plus offers two M.2 Type 2280 slots, and the MSI GS40 and Gigabyte P34W have an M.2 Type 2280 plus a traditional 2.5-inch drive bay.

Even the 512GB SSD offered in the 2016 Blade (a $300 upgrade) will fill up quickly, with today's games starting to take 20GB or more, and some whoppers eating as much as 60GB. As noted earlier, the Blade lacks a media card reader, so the only way to get more storage is to go to an external hard drive or portable SSD, or to the cloud.

Software-wise, the 2016 Blade arrived absent of any bloatware. Only Razer’s Synapse and communication software was preinstalled; the install was otherwise as clean as they come.